Rebel Art Centre

The Rebel Art Centre was an art centre founded by Wyndham Lewis in London in March 1914 as a meeting place for artists to discuss revolutionary ideas and to teach non-representational, avant-garde art. The centre was located on Great Ormond Street and was conceived as a kind of alternative to Roger Fry's Omega Workshops, with whom Lewis had recently quarrelled bitterly. It was intended not only to hold discussions and lectures but also to produce decorative goods, murals, furniture and textiles in a new geometric spirit, and to run art classes. The Rebel Art Centre played an important role in the birth of Vorticism, the only major English avant-garde movement before the First World War: it was in its milieu that the future Vorticists gathered, among them Lewis himself, Edward Wadsworth, Cuthbert Hamilton and others, and the idea of the magazine Blast, which became the movement's manifesto, took shape. However, the centre lasted only a few months and closed in the summer of 1914 as a result of internal disputes among its members. Despite its brevity, it occupies a notable place in the history of British modernism as the cradle of Vorticism.